Saturday, March 28, 2009
28.3.09
Haven't updated this for a few weeks now, been exceptional busy! Here's a quick overview of what I've been doing.
Firstly, I went snowboarding for a week in Avoriaz. We had the most amazing weather, and the snow was perfect. Took my new camera aswell, here's a couple of snaps.
As soon as I got back from holiday I started my four week placement at Elmwood in Leeds. Now two weeks into it and it's going really well, been working on some fun projects and I can feel myself learning new things by the day.
Also on my return from France I discovered that I had won the competition to design the end of year show promotional material at college with my 'end of the beginning' idea. Really pleased about that, such a great note to leave the college on!
On the subject of college, in the evening this week I've been putting together a proposal to design the posters and promotional material for a series of professional lectures at college. Here's a quick peek of a mock up of one of the routes.
I'm hoping to print these at footprint in Leeds on recycled coloured paper using soy ink.
Last Wednesday me and a couple of the guys from elmwood jumped on the train up to Newcastle to go to the Micheal C Place lecture at Dance City.
It took on an interview format with Adrian Shaugnessy asking the questions and being an all round good host.
It's always interesting to hear about people's success's and their failures, and the talk definitly had a more honest and complete approacher rather than just using it as an opportunity to show off.
Other interesting stuff I've seen and thought 'ooh, I'll do a blog about that' includes; lifestyle clothing brand Insight have put all they're old adverts up on their website. Some really interesting and powerful art direction going on here. Check it out by clicking right here.
Also found this online gallery of amazing Lego advertising.
As far as I'm aware, everybody in the world loves Lego, and it's great to see the creativity it inspires to younger childeren is still alive in some adult designers.
Thats all for the moment, need to crack on with some work!
Merlin x
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
Don't Panic! Competition
Don't Panic! have been running a little competition this week in conjunction with HiFi Club in town. The brief is to design some flyers for the regular Monday night 360Club, which features live music followed by a club night. HiFi as a whole has a bit of a retro theme to it, and the club night following the bands is mainly 60's soul and disco all played from origional 7" records. With my subbmission for the compettion I tried to create something that will attract the hip young student audience they are trying to target but still keep some of the retro feel of the night.
They have an existing logo for the night that I'm not really that into, hopefully if I was to win the competition I could talk them into either dropping it or changing it somehow.
A6 flyer, here's the front...
and here's the back...
Fingers crossed with this one!
Merlin
LS6 BMX stickers
My house mate Kyle Harvey has been running a side project for the last few years called LS6 BMX, which documents and supports the local BMX community. Everybody in the house helps out with it now and again; filming, taking photos or blogging... A while back I decided to design some stickers and they just came back from the printers.
LS6 BMX is run with a punk "nothing to sell, nothing to lose" ethos and the idea behind this sticker was to try and promote that and encourage peoples self expression. A good bit of fun!
This last snap is by Tom Bing taken from Kyle Bibbys bike. Team work!
Merlin
My Wooden Owl!
Sometimes it's fun to try and come up with concepts, communication strategies and other stuff that actually has a use, but then sometimes it's fun to do something just for the sake of it. To stop me going crazy from the amount of 'proper' stuff I've been doing recently I decided to buy myself a wooden owl kit! A steal for only £3 (good old craftwise). Also trying to get better at working my new camera, manged to work out how batch processing RAW files works for the animated GIF. These are probably slightly over tweaked, but I just love all those bright colours!
If I get the time I'd love to do another one of these again soon, if I remember rightly they had a pretty mean looking grizzly bear kit. Also on a vaguely similar note, Manchester ethical design studio 'Ultimate Holding Company' (where Kyle and Bing are currently interning) are running an art event soon celebrating Darwins 200th birthday, with an exhibition featuring one hundred illustrations of extinct animals. At the end of the exhibition there is a 10 day period where they tattooing volunteers with the images for free. So if you fancy a tattoo of a dead animal get involved! The general idea behind the show is raising awarness about our effect on the environment and wildlife. Goodstuff.
Merlin x
Monday, March 02, 2009
Left Eye Blind - Continued
Also been developing my work for Left Eye Blind.
They wanted to go in a direction that made them more fun and accessible to a young hip audience, but still professionally credible to the record industry suits.
Here's where we are at the moment, playing a bit more with the legibility of the main type but having a more solid anchoring base. Lets see what happens next...
Merlin
Aneurysm
Me and Matt Saunders have started working on a new little project.
It's a collaboration with Wyld Stallions in London, which is pretty exciting considering all their stuff is ace! Been doing some typography, motion graphics and a touch of art direction for a tittle sequence for one of their upcoming Kolab projects.
I'm loving my new camera, getting to grips with RAW conversion now, haven't taken any photos for years, feels good :)
Here is a first test of the tittle's, I think Matt is going to be working on these more next week to try and get them more crisp and the timings better.
Aneurysm test 1 from Matt Saunders on Vimeo.
More from this soon!
Merlin x
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